Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

You have certainly got to be quick on your feet here, but I am going to see if I can take my full time and make sure that I make all the necessary points that are required in this debate. This is an important bill. It provides for the security of Australia's submarine cable and for a whole range of measures to ensure that security and a range of related issues. I know that Labor members are supportive of the important things that need to be done in this area. There is no question in my mind that the marine cable that links Australia to the rest of the world and provides that large pipe—that window to the rest of the world—to our telecommunications and to our capacity to cooperate, link, interact and do business with the rest of the world is of vital importance. It is critical importance.

This cable is not new. It has actually been underwater for quite a number of years. It was first executed in 1946. It draws your mind, and I want to take this opportunity to speak about the cable. In the second reading speech the minister not only outlined the purpose of the bill but also decided to speak about NBN Co. and talk about the NBN. He really opened the door—or, as it were, opened the pipeline—to talk about NBN and the link between the submarine cable, which is Australia's link to the rest of the world, and NBN Co. and how we link homes to the rest of the world. And I couldn't help but think—I just had this image in my mind—back to the 1940s when this was first dreamed up. That was quite a long time ago, Mr Deputy Speaker—and longer for some than others—but in 1940 they must have been sitting around and talking about the future. I am sure there was no-one, in 1940—in the Menzies government then—who could have imagined just what might be possible with an internet connection or an underwater cable. I can just imagine that, if they had had the same principles, or the same concept, as the Liberal Party does today, many decades later, they would have said: 'Look, we are going to run this cable. We are going to go to all this expense'—it must have been an enormous expense and an enormous undertaking to lay such a cable to Australia—but they would have said: 'Do you know what? We are just going to run the cable. It is going to be fibre to the coast, and that is as far as it goes. Once it gets to the coast, that is it. The rest of you are on your own. If you want to hook into it, you can rock up to the beach, bring your little connection kit, and you can find a way—dig your own trench, hook up your own little bit of copper, and you can get yourself connected to the rest of the world.' Can you imagine what would have been going through the minds of people in the government, in the parliament or around the country, back in the 1940s, if that were to have been the case? Of course, it was not the case—because back then they could see the future even if they did not know what it would look like.

Today we have the opposite. Today, we have some sense of what the future might look like, because our eyes have been opened to the vast potential that exists through our communications, through the internet and through large fibre-optic cables—but we have a government that does the exact opposite. It wants to close that loop. It wants to squeeze and strangle the optic-fibre cable and it wants—and I cannot understand this for the life of me—to make it as hard as possible for people to connect. They are not running fibre to the home, which guarantees you that right in front of your door, whether you connect today, tomorrow, next year or the year after, the connection is there—right to your home: that is where the future exists; right at your front door, when you can connect. Instead, the Liberal Party in government wants to just run fibre to the node—just to down the street to some central point, a bit like if we ran the submarine cable to the coast and just left it there. I can imagine it flopping around on the beach, like an eel, just sitting there on the coast. And then people could come along later; it would be open slather, you could get a contractor to come in and run some cable for you—connect to the coast.

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